Allan Square
is a dark yet humorous coming-of-age story about a young girl growing up
during the 1940s and 1950s in one of the roughest neighbourhoods in St.
John’s. Shirley Murphy was only seven
years old when her father died and life as she knew it changed forever. Poor
and often hungry, she lived with an alcoholic stepfather, a combative
mother, and four brothers who treated her the way only brothers can. In
Allan Square, Shirley vividly describes attending wakes at the
homes of the deceased (for the food),
trading kisses with ushers for admission to the Capitol
Theatre, soaking up the sights and sounds of Water Street, and surviving a
dysfunctional family in the St. John’s urban playground of Livingstone
Street, Allan Square, Theatre Hill, and Queen’s Road.
From adventures in
a school run by strict and unforgiving nuns, to heated battles with an angry
mother, to nightly Acts of Contrition,
this memoir is Shirley
Murphy’s laugh-out-loud tale of childhood antics and misspent youth in
Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital city.
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